M-Pesa will be unavailable as it is set to switch off for half a day to over the April 18-19 weekend to facilitate the installation of the new servers in the country. This is according to an advert placed in the country’s local dailies that notified the public said, “We have begun the long-awaited journey to bring M-Pesa home.”
M-Pesa new customer registration, personal identification number (PIN) changes and account activations like M-Kesho and M-Shwari are set to be unavailable in the 48 hours before the shutdown.
The anticipated move of the M-Pesa servers’ home from Germany is slotted for Saturday April 18, 2015 at 11pm to Sunday April 19, 2015 at noon. This translates to M-Pesa will be switched for approximately 12 hrs.
This follows an announcement from Safaricom CEO Mr. Bob Collymore late last year that the foreign hosting of M-Pesa’s servers was set to end. The eight years that M-Pesa has been hosted abroad it has been characterized by time to time delayed responses to service interruptions.
The advert in the papers said that the move to new system is set to improving efficiency, stability and speed of the service.
Collymore had earlier said that they would be running parallel network every now and then during the test runs and that, “Thereafter, we will have a complete switch over. We expect the new platform located here will have bigger capacity, be much faster and allow other merchants to connect directly to the platform.”
